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LITERATURE, 
ART, AND SCIENCE, 



CONSIDERED AS MEANS 



ELEVATING THE POPULAR MIND. 



THE REV. DR. BIBEE. 



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CONSIDERED AS MEANS 

OF 

ELEVATING THE POPULAR MIND: 

AN INATJGUKAL LECTURE, 

DELIVERED AT THE OPENING OF THE LECTURE COURSES, 

AT THE 

<Eo|ml panopticon, ^Leicester Square, 

ON MONDAY, JUNE 19th, 1S54. 

BY 

THE EEV. G. E. BIBER, LL.D., Ph.D., 

DIRECTOR OF THE LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC DEPARTMENT OF 
THE INSTITUTION. 



LONDON: 
RIVINGTONS, WATERLOO PLACE. 

1854. 



A WISH to see the following Lecture in print, has been 
expressed in more than one quarter. To this wish the Author 
felt that he was the more bound to defer, since it appears that 
in many parts of the Building he was but imperfectly heard. 
He may add that he is not sorry to have this opportunity of 
recording, more publicly as well as permanently, the views he 
entertains as to the mission w^hich Literature, Art, and Science 
have in the present age, — views which have had no small 
weight with him, in inducing him to connect himself with the 
Royal Panopticon in an official capacity. 

In Exchange 
jmv. IjU»» 



LECTURE, 



Ladies and Gentlemen, 

On the occasion of the opening of a series of Lecture Courses, — the 
first of many which will, I trust, be delivered within these walls, — > 
some explanation may, not unnaturally, be looked for, as to the 
design which the promoters of this Institution have in view, and as 
to the position which it is intended that it should occupy by the 
side of other institutions devoted to the advancement of Literature, 
Art, and Science. To give that explanation, is a duty which, in 
consequence of my official connexion with the Institution, devolves 
upon the humble individual who now addresses you; and this 
circumstance I must ask you to accept as the only apology I have 
to offer for presenting myself before you, notwithstanding the 
painfully vivid conviction which I have that there are many, pro- 
bably not a few among those now ^present, who would far more 
worthily fill this place. But while I am deeply sensible of my 
inability to do justice to the task imposed upon me, I am also well 
aware that professions of a sense of inability, on the part of those 
who step forward to address public assemblies, are apt to obtain 
but little credit for sincerity, however unmistakable the subsequent 
evidence of their truth may be; and I shall, therefore, without 
further preface or apology, and in reliance on your kind indulgence, 
at once address myself to the proper subject of my discourse — 
a review, necessarily rapid, of the rise and progress of human 
culture in its various branches, and a brief indication of the views 
under the influence of which it is proposed to make the fruits of 
a2 



that progress available in the Institution in which we are now 
assembled. 

In addressing myself to this extensive field of discussion, it is 
not my intention to trespass upon your patience by a dry enumera- 
tion of names and technical terms; I would rather ask you to 
accompany me in the endeavour to follow in the track of man, 
while engaged, in that pursuit of knowledge, and in those attempts 
to bring his creative powers into play, to which he is, alike, invited 
by the world around him, and irresistibly impelled by the instinct 
of his own nature. In making use of the term man, I should 
wish to be understood as having an eye both to the individual 
and to the entire race ; for as much as the history of the aggregate 
development of human kind is marked by similar stages, and ex- 
hibits analogous phenomena, with the development of the individual. 

At the first stage of that development, in what may be termed 
his boyhood, we find man engaged in exploring the world around 
him, in surveying its external aspect and tracing out its local 
divisions, and in distinguishing and classifying the individual 
objects which it presents to his view. In the very act of doing 
this, we find him gaining full possession of his senses, not merely 
as passive channels through which impressions from without reach 
his mind, but as obedient instruments of that mind, employed in 
such directions and for such purposes as the mind and its con- 
trolling jDower, the will, may determine. And again, in the 
course of this process, we find that he gradually becomes conscious 
of an inward power of thought and of volition, and of a creative 
instinct which prompts him not only to place the objects around 
him in new combinations, other than those in which they natu- 
rally appear, but to alter their form and fashion, so as to render 
them conformable to his own taste and fancy, and subservient to 
his own uses. The first steps made by man in the knowledge of 
the surrounding world are attended by corresponding advances in 
the knowledge of himself and of his own powers, and by conse- 
quent attempts to create a world of his own — in and beside the 
world which he finds ready created for him — out of the materials 
which that world supplies. 

On looking back upon the result of this first stage in the develop- 



5 

ment of the human race, we find, — at no great distance from the 
primitive seat of the human family, — in Western Asia and on the 
banks of the Nile, powerful nations engaged in perpetual wars with 
each other for territorial aggrandizement ; devoted at home to the 
pursuits of agriculture and some kinds of industry ; but above all, as 
the summit of their ambition, taking a pride in the erection of 
gigantic structures, the ruins of which are to this day exciting our 
wonder and admiration, — palaces, not of the living only, but of 
the dead, — the habitations of the former being replete with all 
the objects of luxury which could minister to the gratification of 
the senses, and surrounded by gardens and parks, where the various 
productions of nature, animal as well as vegetable, were collected 
together to do homage to nature's master, man. The monuments 
which remain to testify of the character of their civilization, bespeak 
astonishing skill in cutting out, transporting, and piling up, huge 
masses of stone, and carving them into various shapes, partly in 
rude imitation of nature's forms, and partly in strange and fanciful 
combination of those forms, — as in the Egyptian Sphinx, or the 
Human-headed Bull of Nineveh. The walls of their palaces were 
covered with representations of the inhabitants of different 
countries, distinguished by their national features, their dress and 
armour, and of the productions of those countries ; the sculptors 
who chiselled them being the geographers, the ethnographers, the 
natural historians, as well as, in their fanciful compositions, the 
romancers of their day. Nor was their knowledge confined to the 
earth ; there are plain indications that they had mapped out the 
ethereal world above their heads, observed the motions of the 
heavenly bodies, and learned to calculate the periodical changes of 
their relative positions. Thus far, then, we have an exhibition of 
intellectual and physical power, brought to bear upon the know- 
ledge of external nature, the erection of mighty structures, and 
the establishment of powerful empires; — the spirit in which all 
this was achieved being summed up in the proud boast of the King 
of nations on the banks of the Euphrates, " This is great Babylon, 
which I have built." 

But the human race was not, any more than the human indi- 
vidual, destined to remain in a state of perpetual boyhood. From 



Western Asia and Egypt civilisation migrated to the Verdant 
isles, the sunny bays, and lovely shores of the Mediterranean. 
Here, under the fostering influence of a delicious climate, stimu- 
lated by the infinite variety of forms presented by land and water, 
man rose rapidly from boyhood into youth. No longer content 
with a mere external knowledge of the world around him, he 
began to search after the laws by which it is governed, detaching 
those laws in his mind from the objects in which they are exhibited 
in nature. Hence the science of mathematics, the focus, so to speak, 
of Grecian philosophy, from which mental speculation, independent 
of the outer world, darted forth its rays in various directions, and 
thus gave rise to diverging lines of pure mental science. Hence, 
again, the first rudiments of physical science, the inquiries into the 
origin of divers kinds of beings, into the phenomena incident to 
their development, into the functions of their life, — the cosmogonies 
of the Greek philosophers, their natural histories, and physio- 
logical speculations. But what was most characteristic of this 
period of the development of our race, was the awakening of the 
imaginative faculty, the dominant faculty of the season of youth. 
Ideal conceptions embodied by the limner's or the sculptor's skilful 
hand in creations of exquisite beauty, • — restorations of original per- 
fection, rather than imitations of extant forms, — attested the 
existence in the human mind of a creative power akin to that 
which set the stamp of beauty and harmony upon universal nature. 
Under the influence of that power and sense of the Beautiful, the 
architectural structures raised by the hand of man assumed an 
essentially different character. It was no longer at colossal 
dimensions, but at harmonious proportions, that the creative 
instinct aimed. The monuments of ancient Greece, the relics of 
her halls, her porticoes, her temples, bespeak a widely different 
state of mind and feeling on the part of those who planned and 
erected them, than the pyramids, the obelisks, and other monu- 
ments of Egypt, and the relics of Assyrian, Babylonian, and 
Medo-Persian architecture, exhibited in the ruins of Persepolis, 
or extricated from the moimds of the plain of Mosul. 

But art, the development of the Eesthetic faculty of the human 
mind, did not confine itself to the expression of its lofty concep- 



tions in external forms, in painting, sculpture, and architecture : it 
took a yet higher flight. Detaching itself from material objects, 
the instinct of the Beautiful implanted in man's nature found a 
vent for itself in the modulation of the fleeting sounds -which rise 
and die away on the air, as short-lived as the breath by which that 
same air sustains the functions of life. The quality, the duration 
of those sounds, became the subject of measurement, of calcula- 
tion, of artistic adjustment, in accordance with the laws of har- 
mony and rhythm. The ruder attempts, belonging to an 
earlier stage of human development, to produce sounds of a 
pleasing and inspiriting charactei*, such as enhanced the luxuri- 
ous revels in the palaces of the kings of Nineveh and Babylon, 
and the wild frenzy of their idol worship, — the boisterous 
music of savage or demi-savage life, — gave place to the more 
refined combinations of carefully modulated tones. The art of 
song arose, and, united to that wonderful endowment of man's 
nature, the gift of speech, gave birth to Divine poesy, — to the 
heroic strains which chronicled the martial deeds and strange 
adventures of the conquerors of Troy, the victory of European 
energy and skill over Asiatic luxury and power, — to the lyric 
effusions in which the ardent passions of the youthful life of the 
Hellenic tribes found a graceful vent, — and to those bursts of 
dramatic eloquence, controlled and subdued by the oracular voice 
of the chorus, which embodied to the ears of transfixed Athenian 
audiences the fabulous traditions of the world's early history, 
mingled with dim perceptions of the high hand of Divine power 
and justice overruling the affairs of this lower world. 

And now, having, under the serene and brilliant sky of Greece, 
outlived the enchanted period of youth, man entered upon the 
riper age of manhood, with its sterner purposes and severer 
occupations. To reduce human life to rule and order, — to bring it 
into subjection to unbending laws, to a spirit of domination 
which, for the maintenance of a principle and a purpose, suppressed 
the weaker sympathies, trampled upon the softer instincts of his 
nature, — was the task which man proposed to himself in the seven- 
hilled city on the banks of the Tiber. Personified, within the 
narrow circle of the family, by the lord of the household, that 



imperious spirit wielded the power of life and death over wife, 
children, and slaves; it stalked forth through the streets of the 
city, embodied in the axe and fasces, borne by the lictor before the 
inexorable magistrate, who to-morrow became himself subject to 
the dominion which to-day he exercised ; and it carried the terror 
of its invincible legions over the whole extent of the known world, 
and to its utmost boundaries, where the tide of savage life broke 
in fierce conflict against the shores of civilisation. War, which 
had hitherto been the encounter of masses of brute force, under 
the impulse of hostile passions, became now a matter of science, 
of deliberate calculation; and the organization of human society, 
subdued in the first instance by the power of the sword, was regu- 
lated by the no less rigorous science of law, brought to per- 
fection in that stupendous monument of the accumulated intellect 
of ages, the Code of Justinian. 

It was not, however", territorial empire alone that the spirit of 
domination and conquest achieved, by which the rise and progress 
of the Roman republic, inevitably transformed in the course of 
time into the imperial city, was characterised. All the results of 
human culture which had been obtained by different nations, 
through the preceding stages of man's development, were absorbed 
into the life of his full-ripe manhood, as exhibited in the Roman 
world. The idea of universal dominion was exemplified by Rome 
in a fashion and to an extent which cast the ancient empires 
raised in the East at an earlier period of the world's history > 
utterly into the shade. Not only were all the countries of the 
then known world successively converted into provinces of the 
Roman Empire, but Rome concentrated within herself, and 
appropriated to herself, whatever up to that time had anywhere 
been discovered or invented, ascertained or imagined, wrought or 
realised by man. As the worship of the gods of all the nations of 
the earth found a place in her Pantheon, so the harvest of all the 
seeds of human civilization which had been sown for ages, was 
gathered into the lap of the avaricious and luxurious, the rapacious 
and prodigal metropolis and mistress of the world. There was as 
much truth as fiction in the legend which denied to the Roman 
people a distinctive national origin ; — it was the life of the whole 



race of man that was summed and headed up in the life of 
Imperial Rome. 

One formidable rival, and one only, had Rome to encounter in 
her progress towards this universal dominion. A nation, small 
in its beginnings, originally confined to a narrow strip of land on 
the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, but spread out widely? 
through the lapse of centuries, over its islands, and along both its 
northern and its southern shores, and thence, beyond the columns 
of Hercules, probably across the Atlantic ocean, for a time dis- 
puted the pretensions, and seriously menaced the very existence, of 
the giant-power that was rising up in the centre of the Italian 
peninsula. That nation was distinguished from all the other 
nations of the earth by the peculiar character of its civilization. 
It formed no link in the chain of human development, it con- 
tributed nothing to the intellectual, the sesthetic, the moral and 
social progress of the human race. All its energies were devoted 
to the perishable uses of life. Its industry turned all the pro- 
ductions of the earth to profitable account ; its vessels explored 
every sea; its commerce connected the mysterious East with the 
fabulous West by the interchange of substantial merchandize. It 
was in self-defence against the encroachments of Roman conquest 
that this nation first entered upon the fierce struggle, uncongenial 
to its character and its pursuits, which, protracted through more 
than a century, ended, after a succession of bloody wars, in the 
extinction of the great naval and commercial power of the ancient 
world. Carthage, once the mistress of the seas, whose adventurous 
sailors visited the islands in the tempestuous waters of the North for 
the sake of their metallic treasures, and circumnavigated the 
southern capes of the African continent in search of gold, — whose 
merchants and manufacturers were the purveyors of the world, — 
reduced to ashes by the ruthless hand of the Roman conqueror, 
left no trace behind in the science, the art, the literature of 
humankind, — a beacon of warning against the marring effect 
produced by base utilitarian tendencies upon the minds of nations 
no less than upon the minds of individuals. 

But to return from this digression, which seemed inevitable in 
order not to leave the picture of the life of man in the first great 



10 

era of his existence incomplete. In the Roman world the human 
race had attained the full ripeness of that development of which 
it was capable by the unfolding of its own inherent powers, with- 
out extraneous aid. Unmistakable symptoms of senility and 
decay were rapidly setting in, when, with Christianity, a new 
element of life, secretly nurtured in an obscure nook of the world, 
was introduced, which, combining with the fresh blood infused 
from the hitherto unexplored storehouses of human life in central 
Asia, laid the foundation of another era of man's existence, and 
gave rise to a new development of his nature in another and a 
nobler form. Once more, if we watch the progress of this 
development, shall we find the various stages through which 
man had already passed, repeated under a different and alto- 
gether novel aspect. The period which constitutes the boyhood 
of man renovated by the heaven-born principle of Christianity, 
was spent in the settlement of new states, under circumstances 
of mutual conflict, bearing a striking resemblance to the con- 
tention for preeminence and power, which had taken place 
between the earliest empires of the ancient world. In other respects, 
too, the analogy holds good. Man, represented, in his second 
boyhood, by the Christianized barbarians which had overrun the 
Homan empire, was wholly engrossed by the effort to make him- 
self master of the civilization of the old world, in the midst of 
which he had settled down, even as in his first boyhood man had 
made himself master of the world of nature. By degrees the 
conquerors appropriated the fruits of the antecedent development 
of the human race, and adapted themselves to the form of life 
which that development had produced. In doing so, they, too, 
became conscious of powers which had hitherto lain dormant within 
them, and to the unfolding of which a powerful impulse was 
given by the new scene upon which they had entered. Society was 
resettled upon the basis of the institutions which had grown up 
under the sway of Rome, modified by the benign spirit of the 
Christian faith. The energies of man, when not engaged in martial 
conflict between kingdoms contending for supremacy, or for dis- 
puted cities and provinces, were employed in the erection of stately 
temples, characterized by rude grandeur, rather than by artistic 



11 

beauty, — at once the monuments of the piety of the living, and the 
repositories of the honoured dead, — and of vast monastic edifices, — 
needful places of refuge in those turbulent times, not for religion 
alone, but for whatever of knowledge and of the peaceful arts of 
life had been preserved from the wreck of the ancient world. 

The transition from this state of second boyhood to the state of 
second youth was accelerated by the stimulating influence — 
suddenly brought to bear upon the newly settled nations of 
Europe — of a power wholly foreign in its origin to the previous 
civilization of mankind. On the arid soil of Arabia, among the 
children of the desert, a new religion, antagonistic to that which 
the whole civilized world had adopted, sprang up, and in the 
course of its rapid and precocious upgrowth gave birth not only to a 
political and military system of the most formidable character, 
but at the same time to an unusually rich efflorescence of the 
human mind. While the sword of the Saracens struck terror 
into the hearts of the empires newly founded on the ruins of the 
Roman, their science, their art and literature, developed with 
singular intensity of life, exercised a powerful influence upon the 
mind of Europe. The study of astronomy, geography, and phy- 
sical science, was revived through the impulse given by the explo- 
rations and investigations of the indefatigable Arab mind, by 
whose ingenious discoveries the science of numbers, the art of 
calculation, was remodelled and advanced; the poetry of the 
Moors, ardent as the climate under which it had sprung up, inocu- 
lated the southern nations of Europe with which they mingled, 
with the passionate love of song ; and Moorish architecture not 
only impressed some of its most important features upon the archi- 
tecture of the Christian world, but developed a type peculiarly 
its own, — a type which, while it boldly imitated the glorious vault 
of heaven, rivalled in richness of decoration the wild luxuriance 
of the vegetation of the south, and of which, in this very building, 
you behold a nobly executed specimen, not inappropriately dedi- 
cated to those pursuits of literature, art, and science, which, at a 
former period of the world's history, were so deeply indebted to 
the Saracenic mind. It is true that the rich bloom of the deve- 
lopment which that mind attained was but evanescent ; for the 



12 

tree on which it grew had no root in the deep and fruitful soil of 
truth : yet, if we compare the lasting effects which the transient 
gleam of Moorish civilization has left behind, with the total dis- 
appearance of every trace of the civilization of the Phoenician 
tribes, — which, by a curious coincidence, had spread in the same 
direction, and overrun in a great measure the very same territo- 
ries subsequently occupied by the Saracens, — we are involuntarily 
led to reflect upon the striking contrast, as regards the effect pro- 
duced upon the unfolding and ennobling of the human mind, 
between a national life given up to a mercenary spirit, exclusively 
devoted to industrial and commercial pursuits, to the supply of 
man's material wants, and a national life founded on a, principle, 
however erroneous that principle may be. Wherever there is a 
principle, a quickening power is at work, the results of which are 
never wholly lost, — whilst, in the absence of a principle, the mind, 
falling into bondage to the lower purposes of life, bears no fruit 
except of the most ephemeral and perishable kind. 

Such a principle, a quickening power, shortlived in itself, but of 
permanent influence upon the course of human civilization, in- 
spired the Moorish race during the brilliant period of its intrusion, 
comet-like, into the regular orbits of European life, revolving 
around the central sun of Christianity. The impulse which it gave 
to the cultivation of the arts and sciences was as salutary as it was 
powerful. The silent cloister became instinct with mental energy, 
while its seclusion favoured the patient pursuit of tedious investi- 
gation, and the steady operations of laborious thought. Within its 
precincts, and under its patronage, Christian art arose — an archi- 
tecture which, in endless variety of ornament, still pointed heaven- 
ward, in token of the purpose to which its creations were conse- 
crated ; painting and sculpture adapted themselves to the new 
ideas which they were called upon to embody; music raised its 
hallowed chants beneath the lofty arches of the sanctuary, and 
thence passing forth into the world, displayed its charms, and 
exercised its softening and ennobling influence, in lays of love and 
chivalry. By the side of the dry chronicle sprang up the imagina- 
tive legend and the romantic tale. Once more — as, in days of yore, 
in happy Greece — man indulged in the day-dreams of youth, and 



13 

invested with the grace and charm of poetry every feature of life, 
not excepting the rude encounters and terrible catastrophes of 
•war. The revival of the tendencies of the classic age led to the 
study of classical antiquity, both in art and letters, and thereby to 
the formation of a higher and purer taste. While tournaments 
replaced the games of ancient Greece, a Raphael rivalled and ex- 
celled its Apelles, a Michael Angelo its Phidias; the lyre of 
Petrarch eclipsed that of Anacreon; an Ariosto and a Tasso em- 
bodied the exploits of the paladins and crusaders in epic song not 
unworthy to trace up its descent to the bard who immortalised 
the wrath of Pelides ; and the "Divine Comedy" of Dante repro- 
duced, though in a different form, the deep pathos and the stern 
severity of Grecian tragedy. 

But, like the first, the second youth of the human race passed 
away in its turn; — man entered on his second manhood. The 
golden tints of poetry which had illumined life during the medi- 
seval period, gradually faded away, and a sombrer hue once more 
overcast the horizon of the civilised world. The reign of beauty 
made way for the ascendancy of principle, and the imperious dic- 
tates of law began to prevail where fancy had disported herself in 
playful gambols. The same tendency to organise human society on 
the basis of inflexible rules, which had so strikingly developed itself 
in the Roman commonwealth of the ancient world, reappeared, and 
asserted itself in two diverging, or rather antagonistic, lines. The 
genius of ancient Pome had survived the ruin of her empire; it 
reappeared in modern Rome with increased energy and sternness, 
— with this only difference, that, instead of the sword of military 
power, the sword of spiritual domination was now sent forth for 
the conquest of the world. In rivalry with the ecclesiastical 
supremacy which Christian Rome sought to establish, and in irre- 
concileable opposition to it, another spirit, which had its root in 
the character of the Teutonic races — the spirit of freedom — arose, 
and in the course of a protracted and severe struggle, which in the 
greater part of Europe is still in progress, fought for that inesti- 
mable treasure, the only true safeguard of social order, of truth 
and right, — constitutional liberty, — liberty circumscribed by just 
and well-defined limits, but, within those limits, freedom of thought 
and freedom of action. 



H 

And as, at a former period of human development, the imperial 
city, the metropolis and mistress of the world, had absorbed into 
herself the results of all the culture that had gone before, setting 
upon it the stamp of manly ripeness of mind, so we find at this 
period, in the two diverging branches of European civilization, the 
Honian and the Teutonic, but especially in the latter, every science 
and every art, every department of human knowledge, and every 
achievement of man's creative powers, reproduced in the full vigour 
and maturity of manhood. 

It is to this period of the history of man's progress that those dis- 
coveries belong by which he has become acquainted with the entire- 
circumference and surface of the globe which he inhabits. From 
the first voyages of exploration round the Cape of Good Hope, and 
across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to the adventurous search 
in the Arctic regions which holds the present generation in anxious 
suspense, what strides has he made in geographic knowledge! Nor 
has he been content to penetrate into every habitable and every 
inhabitable region of the earth; he has, by constant observation 
and comparison, and by the aid of sister-sciences, succeeded in 
tracing out many of the laws by which the relations and the mutual 
action of earth, water, and air are determined. The tides and cur- 
rents of the sea and of the atmosphere, the variations of climate, and 
the consequent adaptation of different portions of the globe to the 
life which they sustain, have all been made the subject of investi- 
gation. Descending below the earth's surface, man has ascertained 
the position of the different strata which constitute the outer crust 
of his planet, and the nature and formation of the rocks of which 
that crust is composed. The various creatures which inhabit the 
land, and air, and water, have not only been sought out and classi- 
fied, but their habits, their modes of life, have been closely watched; 
their various structures have been examined by the anatomist; 
the inner economy of the nature of each individual, and the rela- 
tions which they all bear to one another in the economy of universal 
nature, have been ascertained by the physiologist; while the chemist 
has analysed the substances of which they are composed, and traced 
out the changes which those substances undergo in the various 
processes of life. From man's own physical frame down to the 
meanest pebble, the tiniest grain of sand, there is nothing of which 



15 

science is not able to render good account. Yea, and beyond this, 
close and extensive observation of the analogies which run through 
nature's works, has enabled man, from a few fragments of their frame, 
to reconstruct races of creatures which formerly existed on the earth, 
and have long since passed away. 

Not only, however, has man obtained a more complete survey of 
the world which from the first moment of his existence obtrudes 
itself upon his senses and provokes the powers of his intellect to 
observation and investigation; not only has he gained a fuller 
insight into its nature : the increased powers of observation with 
which optical science has armed him, multiplying, as it were, the 
strength and capacity of his senses in proportion as his mind is 
becoming capable of more expanded and more comprehensive 
knowledge, have enabled him to discover myriads of beings, the 
existence of which was not so much as suspected in former ages. 
And as the microscope has laid bare to his wondering eye a 
swarming life which, invisible from its minuteness, crowds the air 
and disports itself in the smallest drop of water, the same science 
of optics has furnished him, in the telescope, with the means of 
exploring the unfathomable depths of the ethereal expanse in which 
this globe of earth is floating, subject to the same laws of motion 
which regulate the revolutions of the countless luminaries in the 
firmament of heaven. These laws he has ascertained with a degree 
of accuracy which enables him not only to calculate their progress 
through infinite space, but to measure their dimensions, to weigh 
their substance in the balances of his mind, and to draw conclu- 
sions respecting their nature, and the nature of their probable 
inhabitants, which would appear hazardous and baseless, were it 
not that every step in the process which leads to those conclusions 
is capable of being verified by the test of science. While thus the 
curtain is withdrawn from that interminable vista into the universe 
of creation, which he, whom I am proud to be able within these 
walls to call our own Sir David Brewster, has thrown open in his 
admirable essay, just published, "on the plurality of worlds," phy- 
sical sicence has watched with astonishing success, full of the 
promise of still further and greater discoveries, the phenomena 
exhibited by those imponderable substances, light and heat, which 



1G 

permeate all creation, and by the yet more mysterious forces of 
electricity, galvanism, and magnetism, -whose agency, universally 
diffused, seems to hover, so to speak, on the confines of organic 
and inorganic existence. 

If we inquire by what process all these wonderful discoveries of 
inductive science have been arrived at, we find that they are the 
result of the application to man's knowledge of the external world, 
of those inalterable laws of mathematical truth which are im- 
pressed alike upon the universe of creation whose existence and 
action they regulate, and upon the mind of man to whom they 
furnish a key to the inner secrets of that universe. Those laws, 
first apprehended and in their elementary form distinctly enun- 
ciated by the philosophers of ancient Greece, have, in this last 
age of man, the age of his second manhood, received a develop- 
ment which has carried the finite to the very boundaries of the 
infinite. They have been brought to bear, both upon the eye and 
ear of man, in optics and acoustics, multiplying his opportunities 
of perception, and rendering that perception more accurate and 
more searching. And, as they have added acuteness to his senses, 
they have multiplied the power of his hand likewise to an almost 
incredible extent, by means of mechanical science and its appli- 
cation to the various uses of life. The forces of nature have been 
pressed into man's service with a boldness of conception and power 
of execution truly wonderful. Steam is made to perform the 
labour of thousands of hands, and the electric telegraph is employed 
to transmit along immense distances the thoughts of man with the 
quickness of lightning, approaching the quickness of thought 
itself. Manufacture, aided by all the discoveries of physical and 
mechanical science, is converting the productions of nature to 
man's use in a multitude and diversity of fabrics such as the world 
has not witnessed before ; and, stimulated by this spirit of manu- 
facture, as well as facilitated by surprising discoveries and 
ingenious contrivances in the art of navigation, and generally in 
the means of locomotion and conveyance, commerce has established 
between the different nations of the earth a constancy of inter- 
course which, independently of its immediate object, that of 
exchanging material productions, exercises a most beneficial in- 



17 

fl.uen.ee, by diffusing among all the families of mankind the 
fruits of human culture, the lessons and the refinements of 
civilisation, and, beyond and above them, the blessings of 
Christianity. 

Nor, amidst the studious pursuits of science and the busy oc- 
cupations of industry and commerce which characterize the second 
manhood of the human race, have the arts which soften and 
embellish life been neglected. The deeper knowledge of the works 
of nature to which science gives them easy access, has enabled the 
sculptor and the painter not only to approach nearer to the truth 
of nature in their imitation of her works, but has led them to dis- 
cover, and by the aid of the chisel and the pencil to embody, tbose 
ideal types of beauty and harmony of which the works of nature 
are, in their endless variety, the manifold expression. Above all' 
the discoveries which, in his progress to manhood's full maturity, 
man has made in himself, the deeper consciousness which he has 
acquired of his own inner nature, with all its powers and impulses, 
have given to art its highest significance as a revelation of an inner 
life, displaying in the rigid marble and on the frail canvas the 
softest emotions as well as the fiercest passions of which man's 
heart is susceptible, the noblest aspirations and the highest resolves 
of his immortal mind, and reproducing, in the representation of 
man by man's own hand, the stamp of divinity set upon him by 
the hand of the Creator. 

Not less marked is the progress towards perfection which music 
has made in this last age of man's development, by its closer 
alliance with science on the one hand, and on the other hand by 
the embodiment of the loftiest thoughts and the noblest sentiments 
of which human nature, under the spiritualizing influence of 
Christianity, is capable. In the compositions of the great masters 
of sacred music who arose during the middle and towards the close 
of the last century, the art has achieved triumphs which can 
never be surpassed ; and while the cultivation of the human voice 
has attained a degree of excellence unknown to former ages, the 
most gigantic strides have been made in the construction of musical 
instruments, and especially of the organ, — of which one of the 
noblest examples extant in the world adorns this very hall, pouring 

B 



18 

forth, from its four thousand fountains of sound, volumes of har- 
mony which vibrate to the soul's innermost depth. 

Nor did the high tone which art has attained in all its other 
branches, fail to reach that noblest art to which the speech of man 
imparts a dignity which no other art can reach — the art of poesy. 
Neither the barcls of classic antiquity, nor the minstrels and poets 
of the age of chivalry, can compare in transcendent conception, 
in fervid imagination, in profound philosophy, or in burning 
eloquence, with the inimitable portraitures in which, — to mention 
no others, — Shakspere reproduces human life in all its varied 
aspects, or with the bold flights of fancy in which Milton soars to 
the unexplored regions of the unseen world. 

Such a vast expansion of all the fields of human knowledge, 
and such a manifold and intense development of all the powers of 
man's nature, could not take place without his attention being 
directed to those powers themselves, and especially to those which, 
making use of the bodily organs as channels of external com- 
munication, and instruments of external action, appertain to 
another order of existence, having. their seat in that mysterious 
immaterial essence which the eye cannot see, nor the hand handle, — 
of which the ear alone can take cognizance in the outer world of 
sense. Hence, while physical science has explored the universe of 
creation, metaphysical science has prosecuted its researches deeper 
and deeper into man's inner nature. The laws which regulate the 
exercise of the power of thought; the laws which determine the 
current of the affections, the feelings and passions ever fluctuating 
within the human breast ; the laws which rule, or ought to rule, 
the exertion of the power of volition, the governing power of the 
inner man; the laws on which the dread tribunal of conscience 
founds its sometimes questionable and uncertain, sometimes unim- 
peachable decisions; and the influences by which the regular action 
of those laws is disturbed, whether springing from the bodily 
tenement in which the immaterial mind resides, or taking their 
origin in the mind itself, and in the spirit- world with which, 
through his mind, man is connected, as he is with the material 
world through his body, — all these are themes suggested by his 
consciousness of his inner self, on which man in the latest, and, as 



19 

far as we can see, the last stage of his development, is no longer 
free, as he was in its earlier periods, merely to muse and speculate 
at his leisure, but with which, by an imperious necessity of his 
inner being, he is forced to deal. Rendered certain, under the 
influence of Christianity, of the existence of his soul, — which to 
the philosophers of the ancient world was a problem rather than a 
truth, — and grown to the ripe age of manhood, which enforces 
grave reflection, man has been, and is, compelled to turn his mental 
vision inwards upon himself; to watch the phenomena, to analyse 
the elements, and to trace out the laws of the microcosm, the minia- 
ture world that is lodged within him, no less than those of the 
macrocosm, the universal world in which his own existence is 
comprehended. 

In reviewing, as we have done, — how imperfectly no one can be 
more painfully conscious than myself, — the whole of this progress of 
the human race from the childhood of simply human, to the man- 
hood of Christianized, that is, of divinely renovated humanity, and 
contemplating the accumulated results of the observations, the 
i-esearches, the attempts, the efforts, and achievements of hundreds 
and thousands of individuals, through successive generations of man- 
kind as a whole, as one mighty aggregate result, there is one con- 
sideration which forcibly suggests itself to the wondering, the 
inquiring mind. " What is that link," so runs the question, " which 
connects the inner life of one mind with the inner life of another 
mind, which ties on the mental life of one to the mental life of 
another generation of mankind ; which makes the discoveries, the 
achievements of one mind, the common property of all, and puts the 
latest generation in possession of the fruits produced by the 
mental life of all the generations that have preceded it up to the 
remotest ages of the world ?" The individual man observes, in- 
vestigates, thinks, labours, creates, during a brief span of time, 
within the limits of a few short years, and then he passes away, — 
he is no more seen, his place knows him no more. Yet the fruit 
of his mind's labour and toil, if there is in it aught that is worth 
preserving, remains behind. The husk is carried ofi" no one knows 
whither by the blast of death, but the kernel that grew within it 
is winnowed out and treasured up in the ever increasing store of 



20 

human culture, for the benefit of generations yet unborn. Whence 
is this indefeasible right of succession which after-ages have to the 
harvest of the mental life of all that ever went before 1 whence the 
power of transmission which enabled the generations from the 
beginning to hand down that harvest in ever multiplying abund- 
ance to the latest posterity 1 

That link of universal connexion between individual minds, and 
between all the generations of mankind, is one of the most striking 
characteristics by which man is distinguished from all the other 
creatures on the face of the earth, the noblest and most wonderful 
of the Creator's gifts to man — the gift of speech. In the throat of 
man, beneath that part of his physical frame which is the seat of 
thought, and connected with the organs which, by the perpetual 
process of inhalation and exhalation, supply the whole organism with 
the fuel of life contained in the circumambient air, there is a small 
organ of exceedingly complicated and delicate structure, the 
various modifications of which, aided by the upper organs of the 
cavity of the mouth, terminating in the lips, produce, by the vibra- 
tions imparted to the air in the act of exhalation, a variety of 
vocal sounds and consonant articulations, capable of numberless 
combinations. Answerable to this wonderful organ by which 
speech is produced, there is, affixed on either side to the same 
organ already referred to as the seat of thought, a pair of other 
organs, of structure wholly different, but equally complicated and 
delicate, which, acting simultaneously and harmoniously with one 
another, catch up the vibrations so produced in the air, in all the 
niceness of distinction which the utterance of speech imparts to 
them, for the purpose of conveying them to the seat of thought. 
Of the rapidity with which this process is carried on you may form 
some conception, when I state that since I have commenced 
addressing you my organs of speech have successively assumed 
between thirty and forty thousand different positions, giving birth 
to as many different and distinct modifications in the vibrations of 
the air, which constitute sound and articulation, — and that these 
thirty to forty thousand vibrations have been caught up and regis- 
tered by your organs of hearing. Of the manner in which this 
has been achieved, neither speaker nor hearers were conscious, up 



21 

to the moment when our attention has been directed to the point ; 
and even now we have neither of us any control over the details of 
the complicated action of nerves and muscles by which the acts of 
speaking and hearing are accomplished. Both the organ of speech 
and the organ of hearing are in the keeping of a higher and more 
skilful hand than our own, which sustains them and regulates 
their action. They are lent to us for the very purpose before 
alluded to, interchange between the life of one mind and the life 
of another mind. By means of those vibrations, produced by me, 
caught up by you, we know not how, the counterpart of the 
thoughts which were in my mind, has been called up in your 
minds ; whether valuable or worthless in themselves, they are no 
longer my exclusive property, — they have passed into your pos- 
session. 

But this is not all. With instructive consciousness of the value 
of this gift of speech, man has from the earliest period of his deve- 
lopment laboured to give permanency to that utterance which, as 
it issues from the lips and enters the ear, is but a fleeting sound 
that dies away on the air on which it floats with such amazing- 
lightness and swiftness. From the rude hieroglyphic which con- 
founded the sight of the eye with the hearing of the ear, to the 
symbols of the shorthand writer substituted for alphabetic writing, 
in order to enable the hand to keep pace with the rapidity of the 
voice, a variety of systems have been devised, all having for their 
object to fix the sounds of human speech, and with them the 
thoughts which those sounds convey. And different tribes and 
families of mankind, making use of entirely different sets of sounds, — 
though all combinations of essentially the same modifications in 
the action of the vocal organs, and the same consequent vibrations of 
the air, — have learned to compare their several systems of speech, 
and to ascertain the equivalent combinations of sound employed by 
them respectively for the expression of one and the self-same 
thought. 

To trace out the history of human speech, the history of written 
language, the connexion between the multifarious idioms, and their 
common dependence on one universal law of speech, what a theme 
of abounding richness and interest! — a theme which, had I not 



22 

already trespassed too long upon your attention, might well 
tempt me to enter, — on another path, for the sake of surveying it in 
another aspect, — upon another review of the development of man. 
But time warns me to draw to a conclusion, and I must pass on. 

Suffice it, then, to observe, that the gift to man of this wonder- 
ful power of transmitting thought from mind to mind, — multiplied, 
no less than the power of the eye has been multiplied by the 
microscope and the telescope, by the art of writing, and still more, 
on man's entrance upon his second manhood, by the art of print- 
ing, — is clearly indicative of a design on the part of the Creator 
that the fruits of man's mental life, of the culture of all his per- . 
ceptive and creative faculties, — the aggregate resiilt of the develop- 
ment of the entire race, — should be made the common property, as 
it is the common produce, of man. All that science has discovered, 
and art has achieved, the history and literature of the human race, 
is a treasure to be dispensed, — and that without being diminished, — 
to all mankind. That of this universal treasure, the common pro- 
perty of the human race, each human individual is entitled to receive 
and to enjoy a share, is a truth which is happily now recognised 
beyond the possibility of contradiction. Too long has that truth 
been ignored ; too long has knowledge, the pursiiit of science, of art 
and literature, been considered the exclusive property and occupation 
of the few. To the masses of mankind the history of man has re- 
mained a sealed book, the treasures of human culture accumulated 
through the lapse of ages have been to them as if they were not. 
Like every other contravention of the benevolent designs of the 
Creator, this, too, has entailed baneful consequences. Ignorance, a 
torpid condition of the mental powers, induced by want of exer- 
cise, has brought in its train the indulgence of vicious propensi- 
ties, the pursuit of frivolous amusements, — pernicious palliatives 
against that sense of weariness which the drudgery of daily toil in 
the necessary avocations of life entails, unless relieved by some 
species of recreation. 

To provide that recreation of which by the divinely appointed 
order of his being man stands in need, in that form which is 
worthiest of man, — by affording to the vast masses of human 
beings which are dwelling in, and daily crowding into, this vast and 



busy metropolis, an opportunity of surveying the accumulated 
results of human culture, in the various departments of science, 
art, and literature, — and thus to aid in dispensing those treasured 
fruits of the mental life of universal mankind which are the 
common property of all, is one of the leading objects for which 
this Institution has been called into being, and the main object of 
that department of it which is this day brought into full operation. 

To take a part in this work and function, — to lend a helping- 
hand in leading men through the outer court of the temple of 
knowledge, in which the wonders of creation, searched out by 
man, and the results of man's own creative powers, are displayed, 
to the door of that inner sanctuary where the voice of God Himself 
is heard, — is, to my thinking, the high privilege as well as the 
solemn and responsible duty of all who have it in their power to 
contribute towards the attainment of so desirable an end. 

Confidently, therefore, while thanking you for the kind indul- 
gence with which you have accorded me your attention, I appeal 
to those who are competent to be instructors of their fellow-men, 
for their hearty co-operation; and I venture to look forward to the 
day when the influence of this Institution shall make itself ex- 
tensively felt among all classes in this metropolis, and beyond its 
precincts, by the encouragement which it shall give to the employ- 
ment of the faculties of the human mind in pursuits calculated to 
elevate, to refine, and to ennoble it, — and so to bring about the 
fulfilment of those prophetic words of the poet-sage : 

" Science then 



Shall be a precious Visitant ; and then, 

And only then, be worthy of her name. 

For then her Heart shall kindle; her dull Eye, 

Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang 

Chained to its object in brute slavery; 

But, taught with patient interest to watch 

The processes of things, and serve the cause 

Of order and distinctness, not for this 

Shall it forget that its most noble use, 

Its most illustrious province, must be found 

In furnishing clear guidance, a support 

Not treacherous, to the Mind's excursive Power. 



MAR 11 1907 



24 



— So build we up the Being that we are ; 

Thus deeply drinking in the Soul of Things, 

We shall be wise perforce ; and while inspired 

By choice, and conscious that the "Will is free, 

Unswerving shall we move, as if impelled 

By strict necessity, along the path 

Of order and of good. Whate'er we see, 

Whate'er we feel, by agency direct 

Or indirect shall tend to feed and nurse 

Our faculties, shall fix in calmer seats 

Of moral strength, and raise to loftier heights 

Of love divine, our intellectual Soul." 



W. S. Johnson, " Nassau Steam Press," 60, St. Martin's Lane. 






LIBRARY OF CONm- 

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